Ken Jennings Teaches Us How to Pronounce Zzyzx

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Ken Jennings from Jeopardy on Zzyzx, California, located between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and the last place alphabetically in the country.

Christopher Mann McKay/Wikimedia Commons

If you’ve ever driven Interstate 15 through the lonely Mojave Desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, you may have seen the middle-of-nowhere exit sign for “Zzyzx Road.” I’ve even stopped to take my picture under the sign, because the unincorporated settlement of Zzyzx, California is, according to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, the alphabetically last place in America.

Beautiful downtown Zzyzx was nothing but a dry lake bed in 1944 when Curtis Howe Springer settled there to found a spa he called “Zzyzx Mineral Springs.” Springer claimed to be a physician and a Methodist minister, though he was a fraud on both counts. He recruited homeless men from L.A. to build concrete buildings on the site and spent the next three decades separating elderly guests from their money by selling them “miracle cures” and baths in his “hot springs.” The cures were just vegetable juice and the hot springs were piped up from a hidden boiler. In 1974, he was evicted (he’d been squatting on federal land!) and taken to court for his quackery.

Springer chose the vowel-less “Zzyzx” name because, he said, it “sounded like sleep,” which he saw as appropriate for his restful retreat. He also saw some promotional value in touting it as “the last word in the English language.” It’s pronounced “ZYE-zix,” in case you were wondering.

California State University took over the facility in 1976, and now operates a Desert Studies Center there. But the Zzyzx nomenclature remains on the road sign, and has become a popular curiosity for travelers in the area. The name inspired a low-budget 2006 thriller called Zyzzyx Road, co-starring Katherine Heigl and Tom Sizemore. The movie is just as notorious in trivia circles as the road it’s named for, because it made a whopping $30 during its one-week theatrical release, then an all-time record for lowest-grossing movie.

Despite Curtis Howe Springer’s promotional efforts, Zzyzx doesn’t appear in most atlases or gazetteers. So what is the last town on earth, alphabetically speaking? That would be the village of Zywocice, in southwest Poland. With a population of 1,300, it’s a bustling metropolis compared to Zzyzx.

Explore the world's oddities every week on CondeNastTraveler.com with Ken Jennings. Check out his latest book, Maphead.